Set Prince Charles on the developers. Is this area not heavily undermined?The flats on the west side of Otago St. were sliding into the Kelvin, and the Koh-i-noor slid off this bluff into the Kelvin. How much ground remediation will have to be done as the other bank of the Kelvin was a "Mineral Yard".

I started wanderin and gallivantin (sober) round the West end nearly 40 years ago. Finding unusual wee shops and lanes and bric a brac etc was always the charm. I would hate what is left to disappear totally.However I stand firmly on the ground for more housing - affordable/social housing, keeping the whole community alive. (sorry, if I've gone off topic)

Bridie wrote:I started wanderin and gallivantin (sober) round the West end nearly 40 years ago. Finding unusual wee shops and lanes and bric a brac etc was always the charm. I would hate what is left to disappear totally.However I stand firmly on the ground for more housing - affordable/social housing, keeping the whole community alive. (sorry, if I've gone off topic)

Agreed but as Rucola suggests it seems very unlikely. The Clouston Street site might be a different matter.

Bridie wrote:I started wanderin and gallivantin (sober) round the West end nearly 40 years ago. Finding unusual wee shops and lanes and bric a brac etc was always the charm. I would hate what is left to disappear totally.However I stand firmly on the ground for more housing - affordable/social housing, keeping the whole community alive. (sorry, if I've gone off topic)

Well impressed ! A view that hasn't been seen for at least 12 years, now there is a great big block of flats where the camera was....Shame, I liked that waste ground - we used to have lovely bonfires with the developers signposts.

Bridie wrote:However I stand firmly on the ground for more housing - affordable/social housing, keeping the whole community alive. (sorry, if I've gone off topic)

The word 'community' annoys me no end, insofar as it is is one of those Winnie The Pooh words that mean exactly what the user chooses it to mean, no more, no less.

You're right but that's no reason to always use it in a pejorative context.

Josef wrote: I take it that in this context it means 'having a few working class people around'?

The economics of house building, especially in areas where site costs are high, mean it's often neccessary to offer some properties for sale or part ownership simply to finance a build which otherwise might not have gone ahead at all. That doesn't exclude working class people - in fact the shared ownership affordability rules suggest most purchasers will be working class.

I don't think you can build a community from scratch but you can add to an existing community. Where I live is still full of people I went to school with, their kids and sometimes even their parents. I suggest somewhere like Glasgow Harbour will never be a community.

Ok the word "community" means according to the dictionary, in it's basic sense "all the people living in one district"

Where I was coming from using the word community in the question of housing (west end) is that for the last 20 odd years the rule of thumb has been new housing = private housing = massive profit to housebuilders and the banks and the government.It has isolated areas and people and made "landlords" out of (some) people who are in it for a quick buck. It has attributed to families who can't afford the hugely inflated house prices of the last decade to either lie to get run down social housing or to move from pillar to post on private tenancies.

In short it has made the rich richer and the poor poorer and isolted communities. I just wish housing ,in general, hadn't taken this huge step backwards............imo !